| One of the greatest challenges facing educators today is the primary prevention of academic difficulties in young school-aged children. Without the early detection of problems that contribute to academic difficulty, the likelihood is high that children who lack basic early literacy skills will fall further behind their peers. Linking early detection of students who are at-risk for academic failure to intervention planning, progress monitoring, and program evaluation requires the ability to assess the development of skills using dynamic indicators of change.;This study investigated the technical adequacy of the Basic Language Assessment-Story Task (BLAST), an experimental Dynamic Indicator of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS), as a measure of global language development in kindergarten children. This study also examined whether the BLAST was an improvement over Picture Naming Fluency (PNF) as a measure of global language development.;The study examined the performance of kindergarten students in order to examine (a) the reliability of the BLAST measures, (b) the criterion-related validity of the BLAST, and (c) the sensitivity of the BLAST measures in monitoring change in student performance compared to PNF and conventional measures. All students (n = 61) were administered pre and post conventional language assessments, PNF, and the experimental measures. Students in the monitoring group (n = 42) were asked to participate in the oral retell task and PNF twice weekly for nine weeks.;The results of this study indicate that BLAST is a more reliable measure of global language development than PNF. In addition, BLAST provides a substantially higher and more reliable estimate of change in student performance as compared to PNF. Validity coefficients are significant for correlations of BLAST and PNF with conventional measures of global language development. In addition, BLAST is less strongly correlated with a measure of rapid automatized naming. BLAST provides an alternative, dynamic method of measuring global language in young children. Further investigation is warranted to (a) examine the correlation of BLAST with a wider range of language assessments, (b) examine PNF as a measure of RAN rather than of language, and (c) to determine the utility of BLAST in identifying language delays. |
